Pell, M.D. (2001). Influence of emotion and focus location on prosody in matched statements and questions. Journal of the Acoustical Society of America, 109 (4), 1668–1680.
Presentation: Shelly
Summary: Thomas
The study investigates the influence of emotion, focus, and modality on the acoustic characteristics of speech. Ten participants were recruited to render sentences with all possible combinations of different sentence lengths, modalities, focus contexts, and emotions. Elicitation of different emotions and focus contexts involves presenting adequate scenarios to the participants with short passages or explanations by the experimenter. The evaluation of the rendition of emotions was only done for the declarative utterances; eight of the participants’ rendition passed the evaluation, all of which were used for subsequent analyses. As for the acoustic analyses, the measures on time contain normalized vowel duration and speech rate, and the measures on pitch include mean F0 and F0 range of words and sentences. Results on the interaction between focus and modality showed that focused words were generally longer. Yet, other patterns such as post-focus reduction and higher pitch for focused words were only observed in statements, not in questions, which might suggest a limitation on the acoustic cues for focus in questions. As for the effect of focus and sentence length, it was observed that in short sentences, the lengthening of the final focus and the raising of terminal pitch were higher than in long sentences. When emotions came into play, it was found that focused words showed the highest pitch in a happy tone and lowest in a sad tone. It was also found that when a question contained focus, be it final or initial focus, the F0 difference of the focus among renditions of different emotions was erased. This finding revealed speakers’ constrained manipulation of acoustic cues when focus, emotion, and modality are considered together.
